Fabrizio De André, the revered Italian singer/songwriter, created a deep and enduring body of work over the course of his career from the 1960s through the 1990s. With these translations I have tried to render his words into an English that reads naturally without straying too far from the Italian. The translations decipher De André's lyrics without trying to preserve rhyme schemes or to make the resulting English lyric work with the melody of the song.

According to the liner notes, after having listened to "Canzone del Maggio" with new ears, the worker compares his life of good sense, individualism and fears with the lives of the students who had the courage to rebel against the system that oppressed them. His doubts increase and he feels like the students were right. But he realizes he can't really unite with them given his conditioning and situation. He decides to act independently and alone, to throw a bomb into a masked ball where the myths and cultural values of the bourgeois powers are on display, and he imagines the results (hence, "the bomb in the head").

. . . and I was counting the teeth on the postage stamps,
I was saying, “Thanks be to God,” “Merry Christmas,”
I was feeling normal.
And yet my thirty years
were few more than theirs.
But it doesn’t matter, now I return to work.

They were singing the messiness of their dreams,
the ingrates of French affluence,
and they weren’t giving me the idea
of denouncing men at the balcony
of one single May, of one single country.

And I have a face worn by good sense,
I repeat “Let’s not have ill feelings for each other,”
and I don’t feel normal.
And I surprise myself still
to measure myself against them,
and now it’s late, and now I return to work.

They risked it on the streets, and for a man
it just takes one sense to endure,
to be able to bleed.
And the sense doesn’t have to be risking,
but maybe no longer wanting to endure.

Who knows what one tries to liberate?
The confidence in one’s own attempts,
pushing away the intruders
from our emotions,
warding them off in time
and before you find yourself alone
with the fear of not returning to work.

Risking liberty street by street,
forgetting the tracks back to home,
I’m worth it,
to arrive to encounter people
without having to pretend I’m innocent.

I force myself to repeat myself with them,
and the more the idea goes over there through the glass,
the more they leave me behind
for their courage together.
I don’t know the rules of the game,
without my fear I trust myself little.

Now I'm late for my friends.
For the hatred I could give it a try on my own,
illuminating with TNT
anyone who has the look and shows only his face,
always agreeable, always more vague.

And the explosion splits, cuts, ransacks
among the guests of a masked ball.
I invited myself
to note the imprint
behind every mask that jumps,
and to have no mercy for my first time.

Storia di un impiegato, released in 1973, tells the story of a worker who, inspired by a song about the French student riots of May/June 1968, decides to become a revolutionary. De André hoped to make a poetic interpretation of the events of 1968, but wanted to burn the album upon its release because he felt it ended up as a political album, with him telling people how to act. The lyrics were co-written with Giuseppe Bentivoglio, and the resultant anarchist/Marxist texts are sometimes confusing and obscure. The music was co-written with Nicola Piovani, who also co-wrote Non al denaro non all'amore né al cielo.